I've never really been able to give veg*ism a second thought and have known only one in passing and two that are vegan when meat's overpriced. Then again, I live(d) in parts of Texas, where vegan and vegetarian are dirty words and insult enough to start a bar brawl.
While I do commend their efforts to make the world a bettetr place, I do wish they'd do more research beyond the PETA website. Yes, CAFOs are bad. Horrible, in fact. After designing one as a senior in college, I only begrudgingly eat supermarket beef. That does not mean every animal that you eat has to be a tortured animal not even given the room to step out of it's own shit. If you look hard enough, you can find inexpensive meat from animals that lived happy lives right up until they met a quick end and found the Rainbow Road. Were they pets? Hell no, but they were loved and did have their own identity, even if it was cow 246: white with brown spots and a broken horn. Along the same lines, eating eggs does not mean having to eat bird fetuses (feti?) from battery cages. Do some damn research and learn that, unless the egg is fertilized, that egg would have rotted anyways. Do some damn research and find a place where Bertha the hen lays eggs in a nest of her own making and scratches for bugs during the day. " Tofurkey, Faken, and Morning Star crap are even more of a cop- out. If you aren't going to eat meat, don't eat fake meat and be smug about it. Eat the real thing. Veg*ism just seems like a self righteous cop-out or an extremist view of "everything has a soul so meat is murder.

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, steak in one hand, chocolate in the other, yelling "Holy F***, What a Ride!"
My Latest Journal

A friend took me to a vegan restaurant last week. It was nearly impossible to eat a totally gluten and soy free meal at this place. The next day I weighed myself and had gained 4 pounds, I felt terrible, and now I have a cold. And then I watched that PETA commercial.

A friend took me to a vegan restaurant last week. It was nearly impossible to eat a totally gluten and soy free meal at this place. The next day I weighed myself and had gained 4 pounds, I felt terrible, and now I have a cold. And then I watched that PETA commercial.

Not a big vegan fan at the moment.

4 pounds?!

Years ago, I wanted to give vegan food a fair shot. So I tried it at different restaurants and selected the vegan options at Whole Foods, and I found it revolting. Ugh. I hope you feel better!

Young Gay Panda hated the school bell, both the sound and the meaning.

One of my favorite classes was in tenth grade, when I took Comparative Anatomy and Physiology. It was both the subject and the teacher’s style. He did not engage in the endless drone of stop talking stop talking stop talking that my other teachers did; mess around and there was the door. He did not yell; he would not talk over us; and very little time was spent in classroom management. Get out.

What I liked more was that he had no respect for the bell. If I wanted to skip my waste-of-time English first period with Mrs. Bra Strap and my waste-of-time history second with Mr. Pervert and my waste-of-time chemistry third with Mr. Ca-Ca, I was free to stroll into the Anatomy classroom, take my partially dissected cat to the empty table in the back, and work to my heart’s content. I could stay until lunch if I wanted, working on the cat or on other assignments, and the teacher didn’t care. I was the master of my schedule, I decided what was important, and as long as I wasn’t bothering anyone around me, I was left alone.

I loved this. To be beholden to a bell when one is trying to learn made me crazy. A fifty-four minute period was not enough time to get through my work, and to have to rush when one needs to linger is one of my eternal grudges against the educational system. I didn’t want to jam-pack knowledge into my mind for the sole purpose of barfing it out at the next test and then forgetting it for the next section. I wanted to see how those muscles connected. I wanted to see how they worked. I needed time to find the little ones, which was devilishly hard. I can’t concentrate well when working in a group, as I did during that class, and I needed those other periods to do the work on my own.

I had always loathed schedules, and after that taste of freedom, I did so even more. That teacher gave me my first control over my education, respecting my judgment call on the other teachers and letting me handle my time. I was drunk on this power. Sometimes I would spend all morning in his room, and would only leave for fifth period algebra because the teacher was similarly fantastic. (Why did I not get calls home for missing class? Young Gay Panda was a master of forgery. Helping myself to a sample of my mother’s elegant handwriting, I traced it until I had her script down cold.)

One of the problems with hating schedules so much is that I grew into an adult who imposes none upon myself when given the opportunity. I eat when I can’t stand being hungry any longer. I go to bed when the mood strikes. I take my Vitamin D3 haphazardly. I resist limiting my writing time in any way. And so, now that my body has decided to be in another weight rut (actually a gain), I find myself wondering if I am inadvertently contributing to this state with how I manage my life.

Sometimes I write out a daily schedule for myself, and then place it next to me and ignore it. It also does not help that I sleep poorly and am consequently tired; with no energy to do much of what is on the list, I just don’t do it at all. Part of this is likely just being Gay Panda; I didn’t sleep that well as a cub either when I was on a stricter schedule. But I know that it’s going to be worse if I shower late (it wakes me up) or write late into the night. Yet I still do these things, because I dislike schedules.

But this week I had to give myself a Scale Break because I just couldn’t deal with it. That isn’t like me. I’m too tired for good self-talk, and that’s partly because my brain is so active at night and also perhaps because I am so lame about eating normal amounts of food at regular intervals. It’s past lunch and I’m happy at my laptop, and what would be fast is pumpkin seeds and heavy cream to hold me until dinner. Making anything would take too long. And yet in the long run, I’m losing a lot more time at my work by being tired and distracted. I hate schedules. And yet I need one.

I think that I will just try this for a week at first to see if I can rein in some of my sleep, food, and concentration problems:

1. Meals have to be at normal times and ACTUAL meals. Not heavy cream and pumpkin seeds.
2. Vitamin D3 down the hatch on a daily basis.
3. Media shutdown at 8, and no late showers.

It may not do anything, but I don’t see what it could hurt. And now I have to make some lunch.

Good luck with the lists. It's taken me a while to be able to adhere to them myself, but they help with my concentration when I do choose to pay them any mind. Eating on a regular schedule helps me sleep better, but I'm still struggling with poor energy levels (probably from sitting all day in an office and under eating).

I was alos a kid that despised the bell. My ceramics teacher in college aided and abetted me in skipping government class in a way I loved. If I was in the middle of a hot streak with a piece- and, let's face it, I had a tendency to get struck by the muses about 15 minutes before class change- he'd tell me to wash the clay off my palms and go ask the teacher. So, in a clay coated apron, a messy pony tail, clay coated arms halfway to elbow, and usually a clay streak or 3 on my face from scratching an itch, I'd go see if there was any reason I had to be in class that day. If not, he'd send me back up to the art studio and I'd be home free. After a while, it got to the point that I'd go down during lunch on Monday, get the classwork and homework for the week, turn them in on Tuesday, and show up on Fridays to take the tests, and wouldn't bother asking.
I got lucky with several of my high school teachers, especially my college level teachers. If you didn't want to learn, you could be replaced with a student who DID want to learn (did I mention these were college level courses in a magnet school?) They also made it interesting enough that you wanted to learn it and, if you decided to be a dick and interrupt class, had no problem with kicking your ass out of the classroom. Programming, economics, circuits, biology, government, and gym were the only exceptions, and those were usually the classes where I tried to strike a deal with the teacher to be able to go back to the art studio or library.
As to an enforced schedule- I can't handle it. I've tried and I've tried, but I don't do wel with a micromanaged schedule. I tend to stick with a checklist of stuff that has to be done before I can move on to the fun stuff. I hafta take my pills before I feed and play with the dog. I hafta sit down and eat dinner and then clean up some before I move on to my evening joys. I hafta get some thing done that day before I can even look at MDA. That sort of thing. If I fuck it up, and do the reward first, I feel so damn guilty about it that it gets done right afterward. It's not necessarily a shedule, more along the lines of a set of pre-quests, quests, and rewards.

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, steak in one hand, chocolate in the other, yelling "Holy F***, What a Ride!"
My Latest Journal